The Silk Folk
Seventeen hundred years ago, when the Hill of Gold was high and new, the Kingdom of Not became a battleground. Red mouths opened and spat forth a host of devils, who pillaged the land and ruined many of the silk folk cities to build their war-citadels. Across the land other mouths vomited up a horde of demons, who howled and burned their way through the Kingdom of Not, killing baby silk folk as they went. The horde of demons slammed against the devilish war-citadels in a series of apocalyptic battles, furious, chaotic, all-consuming. Today a few moldy accounts of the Blood War call them the Not Campaigns, and hardly any of the fiendish warlords remember them. Inconclusive and destructive to both sides, they typified the Blood War of that era and every other.
But to the silk folk of the Kingdom of Not, they were terrible beyond imagining. Ancient tombs were defiled to produce a handful of puny zombie troops. Libraries of history and poetry were burned for kindling. Rivers of blood flowed to appease the thirst of the great devilish battle-machines. For two generations, the silk folk huddled in their burrows and wept.
When at last the Blood War tide ebbed and the fiends departed the plane, the silk folk emerged cautiously from their holes and surveyed their ruined landscape. Where other folk may have wept for the melting of the Hill of Gold, or sworn vengeance over the empty Throne of Not, the silk folk simply stood and thought, and listened to the wind, one and all dumbstruck and awe-filled.
Then one anonymous silk folk spun a web and began to pluck it. He sang the anthems of Not: the hymns of the Lance of Munificence, the Lance of Profit, the Lance of Sensation, the Lance of Trade, the Lance of Utility, the Lance of Value, and the Lance of Worth. He sang of Not’s past glories, of the founding of the Hill of Gold and of the Empty Crusades. He reminded the silk folk that they were a people unlike others, a people who did not mourn what was lost but instead made what was new. And it was beautiful. The chords echoed across the landscape, and they were beautiful, and the silk folk shook away their melancholia and spun new cities above the pits and chasms that had been the metropoli of old.
The mothers of the silk folk, the Exemplars, sit today at the center of their cities, and hum the anonymous bard’s tune. The vibrations ripple outward from the Exemplar at the center, and every silk folk city sways with the memory of the past and every silk folk knows the tragedy in her heart from birth until death. But the silk folk are not a people who mourn what was lost. The silk folk are a people who make what is new.